Ingress – CNY Mini-Series and Mystic @Haw Par Villa Mission Series

Back again with a new mission series less than a month after the last one. The way I use my mobile data only lets me do one major mission series a month, which suits me well XD

Anyway, I made new friends! After finally fixing all the broken links as a result from my blog split, a couple of happy Enlightened players contacted me and one of them (Andrew | floodplug) invited me to his group to do this mission series last Saturday.

I’m very honoured to receive all this recognition and appreciation. 🙂

Before the actual mission notes, here’s a short part on the “CNY mission mini-series” my dad and I did to create a separator (Dad likes a line of six missions to separate the large pictures).

Mini-series mission notes:
– All missions are made up of four hacking waypoints in any order
– All missions are clustered in the Tampines Central Park, so it takes less than half an hour to hack everything
– You might want to prepare some multi-hacks and heat sinks, because all the portals in the are make it very tempting to farm and very confusing at the same time. Sometimes I forgot which portal I already hacked
– I suggest you only hack the portals on the missions first, then once you’re done you can go bananas

Okay it’s not actually a proper mission series. Each mission gives a picture of a Chinese character on a red background. Since I can’t read Chinese, I have no idea what each character means. Apparently there were supposed to be eight missions, so perhaps they were meant to be two sets of four-character idiom-type things. Only seven were approved, so pick any six Chinese character missions to create your separator.

Now that that’s out of the way, I can dive into the Mystic @Haw Par Villa (hereafter referred to as HPV) mission series notes and report. Created by Resistance player Halette, here’s what the entire mission series looks like. It’s a Kirin! A flying dragon horse thing that’s on fire. SO MUCH BADASS! Halette might have chosen the wrong side, but she chose a really awesome picture.

Mission Series notes:
– Consists of 24 missions, and mostly hacking and capture/upgrade waypoints
– All mission waypoints can be completed in any order
– Mission series starts at Exit A of Haw Par Villa MRT station and ends at a Korean restaurant just across road from the starting point.
– The last two missions contain passphrase waypoints, so details on the questions and answers will be shown later.
– Even with the passphrase waypoints, we completed the whole mission series in about an hour
– I recommend you go in the morning (9am, like what we did), or in the late afternoon (5-6pm). You can’t do it at night because HPV has opening hours of 9am-7pm daily. Free entry, but I think you’ll get kicked out by the wardens if you stay beyond the opening hours. Besides, HPV contains depictions of Hell, so going in after dark would be super creepy.

SPOILER ALERT: Answers to all passphrase waypoints will be shown below. Turn back now if you don’t want to know.

So Andrew had invited to me to join him and a few other players for this mission series. I met him first at NUH Burger King for breakfast and we talked for a quite a bit. I found out he loves puns so now I have a new best friend XD

After breakfast, we headed down one stop to Haw Par Villa station and met Jwei (jwei_jwei), an Enlightened agent from the West. Two other Enlightened players Derek (ShagGamer) and Jeremy (Skulldaeron) were supposed to join us at 9am, but they were late, so the three of us set off first to claim all the unique caps we could. 😛

We had a good time racing each other to capture portals and complete the mission, as well as explore Haw Par Villa. I haven’t been there since… Hmmm I do remember going once before, but I was very young. Can’t remember if it was on a school trip or one of those family and friends outings Mum used to organize.

As I mentioned in the mission notes above, the first 22 missions consisted only of hacking and capture/upgrade portal waypoints. The last two missions had some passphrase waypoints, so here are the questions and answers.

And when I finished it…

At about mission #5, there was a section of HPV that was roped off and we thought we’d have to climb over to ropes to get to the next waypoint. I was like, we’re going to hell for this – oh wait, we’re already here!

We had quite a few hilarious moments, like when Andrew said “Ingress: taking you to interesting places only for you to stare at your phone”. Then after the mission when we went to have lunch/brunch at Vivo, all of us were staring at our mobiles hacking whatever portals we happened to drift over and I said “Ingress: Making people be anti-social together!”

I finally met Derek while he was on mission #7 and I was doing #18, so note the overlap of waypoints. I also met Jeremy only after we finished the whole mission. We took a group picture together with the Haw Par Villa sign.

Left to right: Me, Derek, Jwei, Jeremy and Andrew

I sent the original to the Telegram group, and I got “scolded” because the picture wasn’t sharp. I said I was a writer, not a photographer, so John (FortMax) edited it for me.

-Jace